A winning streak

There's usually at least one Australian author - and often it's Steve Toltz - on British awards shortlists these days. Are the Brits having a new love affair with our literature? Is their own a little thin? Or is Australia having a particularly robust year? Certainly the last.

Toltz's novel, A Fraction Of The Whole, which missed out on last month's Man Booker Prize, is selling well here (even better than the Booker winner, The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga) and is shortlisted for The Guardian First Book Award. The newspaper describes it as having "a strongly individual, distinctive narrative voice ... a rumbustious, funny page-turner that tells the story of Jasper, now behind bars, his father, Martin, and his uncle, the criminal mastermind Terry".

The other contenders for the £10,000 ($23,000) prize - chosen by British reading groups from a longlist - are The Rest Is Noise by The New Yorker's music critic, Alex Ross; Stalin's Children, a historical memoir by Owen Matthews; God's Own Country, a novel by Britain's Ross Raisin; and A Case Of Exploding Mangoes, a satire on megalomania by Pakistan's Mohammed Hanif. A panel of judges including the novelists Roddy Doyle and Kate Mosse will choose the winner.